print

The Tower

MEMOIR PROJECT ROUGH DRAFT

When my death comes, it will be a snapping rivet, separating from a metal rod painted blue, a strange metallic blue that seems to be still wet after all these years. And on this rod will be all of my weight leaning down upon it, weakening the rivet that just snapped, and gravity will be the evil arm that pushes me from the perch on high, on high from THE TOWER! But it will have been the eyes of the tower that looked around before commanding the arms to remove the rivet, remove it and let gravity have its way with me. The eyes of the tower are always squinting, waiting, watching for me to try to climb again as I did when I was a child covered from head to toe with whitewash. And as a grown man, I will fall from the railing a thousand milliseconds per minute, remembering… remembering with a laugh that fucker Mike Wesley who told me he would give me 50 cents if I made it to the walkway that went around the water tank like circling the tin man’s head. I looked up at Mike back then from just above his belt buckle. I looked up at his face taunting an eight year old boy with mischievousness for two quarters. I checked him with my eyes to see if he was serious. He was. I could see it in that wicked childish grin hiding behind his adult face. I looked over at Teddy who was a chalky color from the white wash like myself, but he took a step back and shook his head. Mike kept looking at me with a smirking grin and I looked back up into his face again.
“Fifty cents. You promise?” I asked him.
“That’s right, fifty cents. But that is only if you make it to the railing up there where the lettering is. No quarter for only half way or a dime for ten rungs. It’s all or nothing for you Christian.”
I pressed him, “You’ll give it to me as soon as I get down?”
“Only if you make it all the way.’
“If I make it all the way, You’ll give me the money as soon as I get down?”
“Right,” he said without a grin.
“Let me see it,” I demanded.
He laughed as he reached into his work jeans, pulled out two shinning quarters and held them in the palm of his hand just below my chin for my inspecting eyes to get a good look at.
“All right,” I said, “but give them to Teddy to hold cause I know you’ll take off when I get to the top and I won’t ever see my money.”
He shook his head, gave Teddy the quarters, and Teddy pocketed the change.
“And give me a chew for the trip,” I said.
Mike reached to his back pocket, removed a squashed bent foil package of Red Man, opened it under my nose, then he bent down a bit so I could reach my hand in and yank out a big leafy gob of tobacco that looked like a hairball and I shoved it in deep, forgetting that my hands were saturated with white wash. I spit out all the salty white to get to the juice. After a few spits, I was ready.
Mike picked me up by my waist and hoisted my tiny body, to where I could reach the bottom rung of the ladder that climbed the leg of the metal guardian.
Once I pulled myself up to where I could support my feet, I wrapped my arms around a rung and spit on my hands, wiping the gritty white wash off in my pants pockets since that was the only place I was dry. Just as I was about to turn myself to start up the ladder, Mike yelled for me, “Christian, here, take your hat so your hair doesn’t blow in your eyes.”
I looked down and he was smiling with his arm outstretched, my yellow ball cap in his hand. It was the only item on my body that wasn’t all chalky and cracked looking; I had left the hat outside the chicken coop earlier that day so it wouldn’t get dirty. I had to almost climb down to reach it, but I was able to grab it. I wrapped my arm through a rung again, pulled my hair behind my ears and shoved it on my head as tight as it would go. Now, I was ready.
I took the first rung. Hand foot. Hand foot. The second likewise. The third. Fourth. At the fifth I had to make my was around the base of a safety catch securing a cable that shot up the entire rest of the distance of the ladder to the top, splitting the ladder in half, so that from there I couldn’t ever lay completely flat against the rungs, but I was a tree monkey and had climbed up worse trunks that this with Jimmy Johnson hot on my trail in a game of tag in the old goliath mulberry tree so I shimmied up anyway, never looking up, but climbing, one by one, each rung, slowly, cautiously, with each twitch of my fingers or movement of a toe calculated, and for a very long time, the tower was beginning to become frightened that a child was about to visit its majestic virginity, rung by rung. A whitewashed virus with a yellow hat was invading the impenetrable realm and it could do nothing it seemed to keep off the invasion. There was not any fear in this boy. Why was there no fear in this boy? Think, what will make him afraid, what will keep him at bay? Think, he cannot reach the top. He doesn’t want the money, it is jus an excuse to tell his mother when she kicks his ass for getting anywhere near tat bottom rung where he knows damn well he isn’t supposed to be. What can I do to make him look down, no, not down, he is not afraid of looking down. He looks down with every step. Yes, up! What can I do to make him look up? That is what he is afraid of. Yes, look up little boy, look up and see your death awaiting you. Look up…
And that was when the wind began to blow. It reached up my sleeve, it blew in through the holes in my mesh jersey, it whipped through my hair and found every drop of still wet whitewash on my skull beneath my hat, under my shirt, under my jeans, rippling my clothes like a flag wrapped around my body and that was when I began to shiver almost immediately. But I pressed on the best I could, and so did the wind, growing exponentially with each rung. I tried, I really did try to keep going, but I had to stop. I was about to be rattled off like a dog on a leg. I wrapped both arms around the rung in front of me and looked down at Mike and Teddy. They were shielding their eyes from the sun looking up at me from the base. I had gone over half the way up and Mike was yelling but I couldn’t hear him now, the wind was roaring in my ears, and my clothes were noisily flapping every which way. I looked out over the horizon, over the rooftops of the four story buildings across the road, beyond the lake and in the west where the farmland roamed for miles. It burned to look out there, where the wind was rushing and attacking from. It made my eyes stream with tears and I had to squint to keep my hair from thrashing my pupils. Looking back down, I rested thinking if I should go on. I could see Mike waving at my wildly to keep going, yelling insults that I couldn’t hear but imagined just the same, it was all funny to him. The higher I climbed, the higher up his ego went, sending this child into such peril for 50 cents and it was all pretty fucking funny he thought. Holding on for dear life, it hurt, God did it hurt, the cold air of the thought of defeat. I couldn’t go down now. I had come so far, so far, much farther than anyone, and there I was about to chicken out. If it wasn’t for the damn white wash. If it wasn’t for Mike Wesley being such a dick. We were supposed to be able to leave but he told Teddy and I we couldn’t go skateboarding until all of the white water that spread on forever and ever was gone from each of our buckets. “When your buckets are empty,” he said with that condescending smirk of an elder sibling full of brutality, “you can go play.”
“But the entire chicken coop is done,” I protested angrily, “and we both have full buckets that you just mixed up for us.”
“When your buckets are empty,” he repeated, “you can go play.”
“But there’s nothing left to paint,” I yelled back.
“I don’t care what you paint,” Mike retorted, “just make sure you empty your bucket doing it,” raising his eyebrows a little as he finished his sentence.
“Fine,” I shot back, “I’m going to paint my shoe then,” I dipped my brush in my bucket and went to town slopping the stuff all over my foot till it was sopping wet.
Mike maintained his usual demeanor of a grin and said, “Like I said, I don’t care what you paint, just make sure you empty your bucket doing it.”
I glared at him, “So, I can paint Teddy then,” I posed the question sarcastically but reached over at the same time and smacked Teddy in the back with my brush making up and down stroked on his shirt, following him as he tried to retreat from my cold wet brush.
“Sure, if Teddy doesn’t care.”
Suddenly, it caught Teddy and me at the same time as to what he was getting at. Our eyes met for a moment, lit up, then we dashed in separate directions for our buckets getting as much on our brushes as possible, meeting dead center of the breeding room, sword fighting each other, wasting as much of that white shit as possible until Teddy got fed up with this and picked up his bucket and dumped it over my head. We were laughing so hard that I could hardly lift mine up, but I managed to chase him down and soak him from head to toe. And with that, we were free to go, dripping with white wash. And it was standing out front, drying in the sun that Mike dropped his proposition on us which led to me sitting up there shivering like an epileptic all because of that white wash. Since the first morning our eyes met with the strong, defiant gaze of the water tower, we, the children were intrigued but terrified at the same time. It looked like a silver nightmare then. Silver and cracked with huge pock marks on its face where the silver paint had taken a beating and finally gave up the ghost peeling away in the high winds. It was a gruesome sight, as though it were photographed in black and white then painted in the same color scheme with giant letters in haunting gothic letters bearing the name of its father Paul Kneippe, proclaiming to all who passed by that this land which is fed with life and protected was Mr. Kneippe’s dream known as Kneippe Springs. We stood far away from it, just looking at it silently, afraid it might actually be able to step on us. We stayed just as removed when the workers moved in with scaffolding and hanging chairs, swinging around like tiny spiders, covering the old, industrial color with a radiating hue as that of the sky when it breaks through a patch of dark clouds near sunset. There must have been ten of those men on their little webs and hanging planks, and we watched entire afternoons. Coat after coat, taming the creature, taking away its look of a device intended for torture. It took a week to cover up all the former life it had once lived and another four coats of black to make the bold black letters stand out as though they had been carved into the metal skin. Now, it was a part of us, part of The Way, we thought to ourselves looking at it trying to hide in the sky above, but that was impossible. The letters floated on high and like a brand, it could not escape its new owners: THE WAY, and every farmer north and south of us could read at any time the name of the freaks who had invaded their peaceful rural community. Things would never be the same for these people and the water tower would serve as a reminder to anyone who forgot that God’s disciples had arrived.
The tower was looking down on me now, but it wasn’t afraid of my little hands, it had turned its skin icy. The tower looked down on me with dense pleasure, I was its greatest opponent to ever grab for it by the balls, and I had done so with pure innocence. All for 50 cents I reached up and put the squeeze on the mightiest of all the structures in my domain. I reached up with both of my tiny hands and grabbed a hold of it prodigious sack. And holding them in my hand, it did not flinch, it waited patiently for me to regain my insanity. It could feel my rational mind feeling each wisp of the wind like a frozen whip in my skin. I clenched to the metal with every muscle in my body jittering from the cold, but I was not afraid to go on, I had made up my mind to climb what I considered to be my friend. The tower was like all of us children—mysterious and unconquerable—and for the adults to climb halfway into our skin was a terror that kept them in awe. We were what they desperately wanted to be again, but could never be. Oh they trudged on through the scriptures in hopes of finding the paradise from which I was dangling over, I was the great lord over this region beyond the lake of Sylvan and will forever be, crowned with a hat so yellow it shines like gold. I was Adam surveying my childhood from my climb to the heavens, naked in color, skin flecking away with the wind fertilizing the world that spun on and on all around. Here I sat for a millennium in the wind pondering nothing, breathing heavily, waiting. It was now. I must begin or never start again. To stop in the wind was foolish. Without looking down, I unwound my grip and reached one hand at a time for a firm grip on the next cold blue bar one step further to my place with God. With two very tiny hands, I squeezed hard, hard, to hold my weight should I slip, moving my feet back into position.
And now, the tower was in pain. I was digging in my nails. Where once there was fright, there became patience and confidence. And where once there was pain, now there was anger. A terrible anger… the anger of God… and I heard his terrible voice thunder down to me… “Look up to me Lucifer. Do you think you can join me on my throne? Look up to me child, see your death.” And, hearing this omniscient voice, I, for the first time in my entire climb, tilted my head back and saw before me a row of tracks leading on, so far into the sky that the points where the tracks came together below the angry face kept growing with each second into which I stared down them. My hands were puny and my body miniscule and the tower so far away, so very far away, it was in the stars. And each rung I climbed took me further from the destination above. And as I looked up, very far up, gravity pushed on my jaw and down from the eyes of God poured the liquid potions of my mortality that tumbled into my throat incessantly, paralyzing each cell as it poisoned all that I thought I was to be with the fear of death. Looking up, I knew now that I would die should I climb to the top. It would be in the process of trying to pull myself to the walkway that I would lose my hold on my life and fall to my death and unlike my hallucination of Bigfoot, I would not escape unscathed as he had. It was from here I was now clinging to so dearly that we had all seen Bigfoot fall. Jimmy Johnson and Pat McGowen had woken us up to show him to us that night, as they had been doing all week to show us other signs of our hairy visitor that left blood besides Jimmy’s bunk and took food from Pat’s lunch bag while we napped. It had only been a few weeks earlier, when all the children were living in one hallway with a fire escape at the end looking straight at my blue friend that we saw him. We were all corralled into this hall as a type of camp for us kids. A chance to get a few hundred feet from our parents, but it was like one huge slumber party that lasted a whole week. All week long, Jimmy woke us up screaming in our faces that he had seen Bigfoot out a window, or in the hall, or climbing some portion of the nearby building. Then Pat began to spot him too. The rest of us had our doubts at first, but when a bloody hand print showed up on the wall over Jimmy’s head, we started sleeping with bats. The grownups were asleep on the other side of a fire door thinking we were confined, so every night we snuck out by the fire escape, setting out food to see if we could lure the beast into plain view from our window. All week long it was the same thing: in the morning, the food we had heisted from the dinner table was gone, but none of us, except Jimmy or Pat, had seen Bigfoot, and that was only because they had stayed awake the longest. And as we lured him in closer, we put pocket knives next to our bats and we felt safe enough to doze off. Sure we were safe. What chance did a seven foot, 400 pound monster have against ten 50 pound kids wielding 3” pen knives and swinging baseball bats have? Besides, if all else failed, we had our berserker, Jimmy Johnson, who would do Bigfoot in just like he was going to do Ian Richards in. Ian made Jimmy mad, so Jimmy pulled out his knife, reared it back over his right ear, and lunged through the doorway at Ian at the exact moment the door slammed shut in Jimmy’s face, embedding the knife into the wood, running Jimmy’s fingers over the hair slicing blade, nearly severing his pinky just below the first knuckle. I could hardly pull the knife out of the door in time for the parents to arrive to the sound of Jimmy’s screaming, “I’m going to kill him! I swear I’m going to kill him!” So we all felt sure that Jimmy could handle Bigfoot as long as the creature didn’t slam any doors during Jimmy’s attack. And so it was on the last night of our “camp” that Jimmy woke everyone up in a panic, ushering us to the landing of the fire escape, pointing over and over to the Tower, where in the night it gave off the gleam of a body of water full of moonlight. But our tower, our strange and mysterious friend was not alone on this night. On its side, scaling the ladder at the place I was now dangling from, was a seven-foot-tall beast, covered from head to toe in shaggy blackness, its body shaped like an Adam’s apple on the throat of the Tower. There were only four of us besides Jimmy and Pat on the landing that night, the others could not be woken, and all four of us, with the help of Jimmy’s gesturing finger all saw this hairy creature climbing up our friend. Then, as if it could feel our diminutive gazes, looked over to us and fixed its gaze upon us long enough to send off a mocking threat of contempt our way, just as it turned and let go of the ladder, doing a belly flop into the yard beside the chicken coop. A few minutes later, we saw a dark figure running in the fields very far away with a white, limp object flopping in its mouth. That was the last we ever saw of Bigfoot, and looking into the fixed gaze of the Tower, I was swallowing the truth: Childhood is the most beautiful lie, and Jimmy Johnson was the greatest of them all. Even after admitting the entire hoax spun up by him and Pat McGowen, and even after confessing to cutting his own finger to make the bloody handprint, it made me sick to think it was all a fabrication of my mind and that somehow he had fooled four of us at once into believing that we had seen a giant hairy creature plunge into the dark night from the very spot on which I was frozen to. It sunk into me like fudge full of chocolate chips that tastes so good in the mouth, swimming on the tongue, but dizzying the stomach with rich vertigo. I went pale. Bt this time, it was not the whitewash. I was feeling gravity pulling me in every which way and at that moment I lost my childhood faith in my imagination. I knew then that no creature, no matter how big or tough, could climb so high and just let go into a free fall. I knew then what it meant to die from trying to climb too high. So slowly, foot by foot. Hand by hand. Rung by rung. I climbed down. At the bottom, Mike offered his condolences for my failure in reply to which I told him quietly that I got too cold. It was supper time by now, but I didn’t feel like eating. My stomach was churning with vertigo the entire way up to my bedroom. I had a room with a tub so I ran a hot bath and undressed slowly, finding that white wash had left little football shapes on my chest through my mesh shirt. Slipping into the tub, these dissolved along with my fright and soon, I had peace in my soothing bath. It was beautiful being a child then, letting profound moments go by without a care, soaking them out of the bones, unknowing that many years later an adult man would have dreams of standing at the base of skyscrapers, and looking up become overwhelmed with vertigo in the exact same fashion as that day on the Tower. It wasn’t until right before lunch the next day that I remembered to tell my mom that I had climbed halfway up the water tower.
“You did what? Why?” She yelled.
I told her Mike had offered me 50 cents if I made it to the top, but that I was too cold to make it all the way up. Suddenly, after hearing this, her eyes lit up, and I could tell I was off the hook. She disappeared very suddenly and after lunch, she handed me two quarters from Mike as well as a promise that he would never endanger my life for 50 cents ever again.

END
© 2006 Christian Cloud Abraham

Posted on August 9, 2006 in
Emotion: Fear, Type: Creative Nonfiction